Perl Hardware?

I have played around a bit with basic stamp applications to program chips, in the past. All of the interfaces that I have used were simple serial port attachment with a place for a chip to plug into. The down side was the language used to program the chips, a mixture of assembly and basic variants.

Does anyone know of a basic stamp kit that will allow you to write your code in perl?

Comment on Perl Hardware?

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(jcwren) Re: Perl Hardware?
by jcwren (Prior) on Apr 05, 2001 at 18:03 UTC

You'd have better luck trying to stuff the known universe into a ping pong ball.

Perl requires a huge underlying infrastructure to work. It needs an operating system with file I/O, memory management, signals, and a fair handful of other "sophisticated" (compared to what a BASIC stamp offers) support mechanisms to function.

And consider this: Ever notice how long it takes Perl to spool up with certain modules? Your average PC is a minimum of 200 times faster than a PIC (we're not talking about raw clock speed, we're talking about processing capability). Can you imagine how long it would take on something like that? Heck, by the time it got running what ever you had wanted to do would be obsolete.

While embedded Perl will become a viable project on certain classes of hardware, it will never run on an 8-bit processor with 4K of program store and 2K of RAM. This would be like trying to get Unix running on a PIC. It's just not scalable to that small an architecture.

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